Originally written April 2020.
Having previously taken a look back at looking at Titans Return Arcee, it’s only fitting that I look at the other figure that fills the same ultra-specific niche: A retooling of Titans Return Blurr into an IDW-specific, fan-demanded female character. It’s time to look at Nautica.
Nautica was created specifically for the IDW comics, and introduced during the Dark Cybertron crossover event, along with Windblade and Chromia, as part of a trio of female Transformers from the planet Caminus. She’d immediately migrate over to the cast of James Roberts’ critically-lauded More than Meets The Eye series, and become a central character of that story, and its sequel, Lost Light. She was an engineer and scientist, incredibly intelligent, pleasant and chipper, but often socially clueless. She struck a chord with readers, and quickly became a fan favorite in a series that was already a fan favorite. That popularity was enough to bring her back in the rebooted IDW continuity, as a xenobiologist/ambassador to other worlds.
Nautica was one of a few IDW-original characters that were never intended to be merchandised, and were just created for the comic itself. Nonetheless, Hasbro decided to give her a figure after the fact, near the end of Titans Return, in the form of this exclusive retool. However, it was kind of hard to get, in that it was part of a giant, pricey four-figure and four-Titan-Master giftset, Chaos on Velocitron, available at Toys R Us and online. The set, and its sister giftset, Siege on Cybertron, were an incredibly random grab-bag of homages to IDW, Generation 2, late American G1, and late Japanese G1, which meant that it was rare that a collector wanted all of the figures in the set. You either had to bite the bullet and go in on the full box (to be fair, I’ve heard all of the figures were pretty good), or try and find someone selling the individual figures secondhand, which was hard, because Nautica’s popularity meant dealers frequently jacked the price way up. I got incredibly, incredibly lucky and found someone splitting the set up, and selling her at a reasonable price, and jumped on it. So, let’s have a look at her, and see if it’s worth the potential markup.
Titan Master Parsec
So, a strange thing about this boxed set in general was that it didn’t properly name any of the Titan Master partners. We’d later learn their names from other Hasbro press things. Either way, Parsec is Blurr’s partner, Hyperfire, with a new robot face on the back. She generally got the short end of the stick deco-wise, in that she’s totally unpainted, just cast in bright purple and dull lavender. This was an occasional problem throughout the Titans Return line, with it being random how much deco a partner would get, but particularly disappointing to see in an exclusive like this.
Still, there’s some nice sculpting on the little head, with a humanoid face with a kind of shocked expression beneath an eye-covering visor. A shame it got no deco ( I’m using the much-more-painted Takara Titan Master for comparison, but even the North American release had some paint on him). Aside from that, Parsec’s got the usual Titan Master poseability, with shoulders, hips, and knees, and can easily fold over to form Nautica’s head, the new bit of tooling.
Ok, so, about this head. As I’ve mentioned before, every Titan Master had to form a square, blocky head (thanks to the transformation) that had to be a particular size and shape (so the figure could fit into chairs and things), and it worked better on some headsculpts than others, and this is one where it didn’t work out very well.
In the comics, Nautica would often (but not always) have a clear visor over her eyes, as shown in that first photo uptop. That’s something that isn’t replicated here, since it would make the head too big, and sculpting in an opaque one wouldn’t have looked good. Still, she didn’t wear it all the time, as you can see right above this. The other thing it’s missing is the antenna she had, for the same reasons. Finally, she has a very round head, and while they try to suggest it with the facesculpt, it really doesn’t come across. Still, they tried, and details like her forehead crest and yellow brow are here, but the small compromises necessary to make it fit on a Titan Master make it not come across as terribly faithful. It’s very well-painted, for what it’s worth, and I particularly appreciate the delicate trace of light purple lipstick, it just doesn’t read very much as the character.
Vehicle Mode
Nautica’s altmode is a submarine, with limited space-travel abilities, pictured here.
The surprising thing about this altmode is that there’s almost no retooling from Blurr, it’s the exact same high-tech wedge-shaped racer, but with a pair of large fans on either side, sculpted to resemble the ones from the comics (they tended to change from drawing to drawing, but their design looks to be more or less faithful to the above image).
These fans look like a retooling, but, strangely, they’re actually a pair of accessories that plug into ports that were already there on Blurr’s sides.
In fact, you can easily remove the fans, and give them to most other iterations of the mold (though they’re a very loose fit on Arcee, and they don’t fit on Brainstorm, both thanks to retooled parts).
Pop them off, and it’s just Purple Blurr, complete with little antenna thingie uptop. Pop them on, and the drastically changed silhouette instantly scans not as a racer, but as a late-G1 pseudo-spaceship, which her altmode basically is. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough. Of course, the biggest question is why a submarine/spacecraft hybrid would have an open cockpit, but hey, robots don’t need to breathe, right?
For colors, Nautica is primarily a warm, vibrant shade of purple, one that I don’t often see on Transformers. Her comics iteration tended to be a darker shade, but I kind of like this color. Both through plastic colors and paint, her secondary colors are a light grey-lavender, and a bunch of really nice vibrant yellow accents. In particular, I really like the striping along this mode’s body, it suggests speed more than the sculpting itself does. It seems like she had a pretty good paint budget, something several mass-release Titans Return figures didn’t have (including the original Blurr). The only bit of deco that bugs me is her blatantly upside-down Autobot insignia on her windshield (how’s the pilot supposed to see?), due to them prioritizing its robot-mode placement.
Like I’ve said before, the vehicles in Titans Return were excellent in terms of how much stuff you could do with them, most of which revolved around interacting with the Titan Master minifigures. Nautica, for starters, still rolls well along three little wheels, despite this mode being designed to either swim or fly. For other gimmicks, a Titan Master can, again, sit in the very open spaceship-submarine cockpit with the blocked windshield.
There’s also normally a couple of small pegs on either side of the cockpit that can also fit Titan Master figures who want to dangerously ride on the sides of the vehicle, but they’re actually blocked by the fan accessories, though you can remove them to access the pegs.
Nautica comes with a long laser gun accessory, which really, really looks like something that goes on a Seeker’s arm. You can mount it under her hood, or on mounting ports on either side of the vehicle. I was worried it would bump into her fans, but the mounting point is slightly higher on the car body than the fans, so there’s just enough clearance for it to fit.
Like the other versions of this mold, you can take the hood piece off, flip it over, flip down a kickstand, and install the weapon to create a little battle sled for a Titan Master to ride on. The shield and gun come right from Blurr, so it’s quite different-looking from Arcee’s. It can still fit on one of the mounting points on the side, too, for underwater-outerspace-combat action.
Just, generally, this is still a strong, fun altmode. It’s a bit silly, and I love the colors.
Transformation
As I ranted about when I looked at Arcee, this is the perfect kind of transformation: Short enough that you can do it in a minute, but involved enough with its twists, flips and snaps to feel satisfying in your hands, and with no fiddly bits or difficult parts. This is peak fun transformation engineering.
Robot Mode
We’ve got the new head uptop, and the new fans on her shoulders (that once again can be given to other iterations of the mold), but this mode’s body is, once again, Purple Blurr, without any other real retooling. But I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Blurr’s lithe speedster body really does translate well into a female character.
But does it work as Nautica? The answer is “mostly, kinda.” Her shoulder fans certainly give her the right silhouette, and a few other details (stompy boots, triangular pieces on the backs of her arms) match up to her comics model, so I’d say it passes the squint test.
This mode really underscores the fact that her bright-purple and lavender-grey colorscheme is different from her dark-purple and flat-grey comics counterpart, but I honestly like the figure’s take better. The rest of her colors only loosely approximate her comics model (including a random splash of dark blue paint around her feet, for some reason), without much of an attempt to match things up, but taken on its own, it mostly gets the feeling right, aside from the still-doesn’t-look-right head.
They certainly could have retooled a lot more on her, like they did with Arcee, but I have no idea what kind of budget they were working with when they planned out this late-game boxset.
Still, it’s a good choice of mold, in that it’s still solid-feeling in hand, and impressively poseable (pre-Siege lack of ankle tilts aside). Plus, unlike Arcee, her head’s neck connection is actually nice and sturdy.
For accessories, she comes armed with that same long purple Seeker-looking laser. Honestly, Nautica wasn’t much of a gunslinger, so her packing heat feels a bit wrong.
Luckily, you can mount it on her forearm instead, where it feels more like some kind of welding torch, appropriate for an engineer. For her other accessory, she comes with her triangular shield, which I usually leave mounted on her back, for the added bulk.
Unfortunately, the shape of the shield is a problem, in that when it’s properly mounted on her arm, it bumps against her shoulder fans, stopping her from holding her arm straight, or really using it very effectively, unless you remove the fans.
You can try a couple other things involving the shield and her gun/torch, but they all look a bit awkward, and it’s better off as a backpack.
Like Arcee, she sort of suffers from missing her most distinctive accessory: Her trusty multipurpose high-tech wrench, which she was never seen without in MTMTE/Lost Light, but you can always do like I did, and give her the one that came with Siege Ratchet.
I also sometimes like to pair her up with the Titan Master Shuffler’s weapon, which mostly fits her colorscheme, and can pass for either a missile pod, or some kind of high-tech scanner/repair device, depending on which way you squint.
Plus, Shuffler’s head works as an interesting alternate head for Nautica.
Overall
Make no mistake: This is, at its heart, a good figure. It’s a good mold with a great transformation, fun extra features, and vibrant, nice colors, with only a few cosmetic quibbles.
As the one and only representation of Nautica, a well-loved IDW original character, it’s a bit of a mixed bag that tries hard, and only partially succeeds. But the base mold itself being fun tends to paper over those problems, in my eyes. So, were price and availability not an issue, I’d say definitely snap it up, both if you’re a fan of the character and series, or just like good, unique toys. But price (really really expensive) and availability (there’s honestly not a lot of people selling the entire boxset, much less just Nautica these days) are definitely a factor, and I don’t know if I can recommend this figure for the amount of effort and money it’d take to track it down, not when they could have made it more accurate. I really hope we get another Nautica in the future, one that’s at least more widely available, if not more accurate. For now I’d say that, if you happen to stumble across this figure for a good deal, like I did, then it’s well worth snapping up.
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